1 Feminine Types Yet Uncharacterized.
I FEMININE TYPES YET UNCHARACTERIZED "Woman," said the great Goethe to Eckermann one afternoon, resting his cup of Rhine wine on the table, "Woman is the sole remaining object upon which we may pour out our ideality. As to men, there is nothing more to be done. Homer has taken them all." Our moderns, nevertheless, are yet far from taking possession of the new world thus pointed out on the horizon by our Father of Weimar. The student of the literature of character, even the most recent, invariably turns from it disappointed to find it so poorly balanced that, while surcharged with varied masculine types, carefully drawn and distinct, it presents hardly a feminine character in the least degree original and unforeseen. And his justifiable disappointment condemns us. Will neither novels nor plays, neither the writings of moralists, the greatest of epics, the most piquant of memoirs even when written by women or by specialists in feminism will they never cease to exhibit this shameful poverty? In explanation of "it, certainly, several theories exist. There are always theories with which to excuse our failures. But a following up of the present inquiry will, better than idle discussion, effectually destroy this supposed resemblance of all women to one another, this classification according to the merely sexual aspects of their life; maidens, sweethearts, wives, mothers, etc. Truly an easy simplification, but one which in reality denotes, on the part of the author making use of it, a field of vision limited by a state of erotic obsession. . . .Take a turn in the air, my dear sir, and return refreshed to pursue the present study! You have been too greatly occupied by their femininity to be able to see them as complete individuals (and by this I mean from foot TO HEAD, of which they have, believe me, quite as much as you) ! Let us imagine for a moment a new Amazonate, wherein the blue-stockings, monopolizing literature, in their turn do not deign filled with pride and selfish desire to consider anything in man except their sexual ideal. Many a physiognomy in our eyes marvelous, would in theirs, fixed upon shapely limbs or graceful elegance, lose all its glory, and the figures of athletes or of handsome pages would soon eclipse the profiles, to us so distinct, of Hamlet, of Ulysses, of Job, of Newton, of Boniface VIII or of Junius Brutus. A view so imperfect (and of which the symptoms may perhaps be diagnosed in more than one feminine romance) would however be justified by a social state. Thus that of the antique city explains the small number of its feminine creations. Antigone was the ideal Daughter, Electra, the Sister, Alceste and Penelope represent the Wife, near at hand or far away during absence, war and labors. In Andromache was incarnated the Young Mother ; Hecuba and Jocaste represent the Aged Mother and her griefs; Helen realized the Inconstant Beauty, Medea the Dangerous Mistress, and Ariadne the Sacrificed. For woman, in whatever was not relative to man, had no place in that literature of the agora, civic tragedy, epic chanted in the public square, history recited to the four winds, lyricism dedicated to gymnasts, philosophy of gardens and banquets. But we, who for a century have so presumptuously claimed the creation of a literature of the soul, of the individual, of the home; we who see women mingling in all things, sharing all activities, truly we are inexcusable ! And we are duly punished. Note, in brief, this principle, which we shall verify more than once in the course of the book ; poverty of subdivision of a general type brings about a poverty rigorously proportionate in the elements which in turn compose each individual type. Each new character, once drawn in literature, represents a veritable discovery, in the scientific sense of the word, in that it brings to light a latent and heretofore unfamiliar part of our soul, of which we become conscious in the suddenly aroused interest; a conquest wrested by our consciousness, aided by this example, from the subconscious wherein it stirs as deeply buried as within an animal. From the day, then, when in the above hypothesis we ceased to distinguish between Hamlet and Job, we should already have ceased to discern in the former his catholic conscience, his tendency to dreaming, etc., and, in the Arab, his patience, the unshakeable firmness of his faith, and so forth, perceiving in them only those points which they have in common, their lack of eroticism, among others. And thus a corresponding confusion would reign anew among the inward faculties of each human being of the time. Now, absurd and humiliating as such a confusion may appear to us, we tolerate in ourselves one precisely similar with respect to the very many women whom we classify merely as "cold" and "mystic". Need we be surprised, after this, if, in all women, each one of whom might personify a special region and clearly illustrate it for us, we find ourselves inevitably arrested at some time by the incomprehensible, upon the frontier of a strange country inaccessible to our logic, or, if you will, to our consciousness, which is the author of its own defeat. And as love alone which is to say the inconscient can serve us as guide, however hazardous a one, we do not hesitate to test it. A consequence still more serious: to forget, to refuse to understand this or that type of woman, because not amorous, is to condemn ourselves to an ignorance of almost all women, outside their compliant but servile, fugitive and uncertain dependence upon ourselves; it is to condemn ourselves furthermore to an ignorance and misunderstanding, not only of half of the human race, but of HALF OF OUR OWN INDIVIDUALITY. For every man has within him, morally, the feminine character complete, neglected and believed by him annihilated at the time of puberty, hidden in a shadow rich in reality with inexplicable revelations, just as, on the other hand, every woman possesses also the male character. (How else would it be possible for the father to bequeath to the daughter, and the mother to the son, a portion, sometimes so considerable, of their characters, while nevertheless the masculine and feminine types do not become less distinct?) Again, a cause of the silence to which antique society reduced woman might be found in the nature of each man, as it is even yet found in those (otherwise often beautiful and strong) of the Moslem, the Buddhist, the polytheist, of the non-Christian, to use a general term, for the Hindu, the Persian, the Chinese or Malay cannot be called uncivilized. Man, then, was a Citizen or a Subject; he was not a Soul, in the absolute sense of the word, separate and complete. Even when such a man loved a woman, he showed, in consequence of the contrast between the radiation of his pride and his blindness toward her, a sort of pederasty, an idolatry of Passion, a monologue before Flesh. He fell upon and assaulted her; he never contemplated her fairly face to face. Whether one regrets or commends the change everywhere inaugurated by Christianity, the OTHER BEING, freed from the oppression hereditary since the "fall," has begun to speak in our hearts, and, we must admit, more clearly from century to century. It is this dialogue in us which we hear in the Sacred Writings, in the greatest of poets and the profoundest of philosophers. From this dualism vainly proscribed and which Nature, one might say, has symbolized in the symmetry of the two halves of our bodies as divided by a perpendicular line result the many disconcerting contradictions of our conduct, the perversions of our will, the antinomies over which Racine wept, by which Poe was fascinated, from which Hegel reasoned. And the "mauvais menage" wherein each of us contends with himself, results from the persistence of our vanity in its ignorance, or rather its indolence in the interpretation of one-half of the human race. Shall we not attempt it? This will be, however, but a beginning. For, equilibrium once re-established between the sexes, we shall be led to re-establish it between the divers types of our own. We cannot sufficiently wonder at the lacunae which, from this point of view also, literature presents, and at the great number of characters encountered in life, whose portraits we never meet in books or upon the stage. To assure himself of this, the reader need but enumerate his relatives and friends, for example, defining them with the precision for which he will here find the means.